Once you have a belief that disability insurance is a necessary part of someone’s financial plan, you need to understand what it is that you are selling.
There are several places you can go to study the actual makeup of a disability insurance policy. One of the best is reading a specimen policy from one of the carriers you represent. Once you can read a specimen policy and explain to a client in real world terms what each section of that policy means you’ll know more than 95% of the licensed life and health insurance agents in the world. When you can help a client to understand why they may prefer a pure own-occupation policy to a modified own-occupation contract or why an elimination period that requires consecutive days of disability is almost worthless, you’ll know you are starting to become pretty good at your job.
Believe me, most agents sell on cost and never get past the waiting period and benefit period when discussing a disability policy. You will be dangerous when you are in a competitive situation and you can put two disability insurance specimen policies side by side in front of the client and point out the material differences between the two.
Now you’ll need to take this knowledge of the specimen contract a step further. Use your belief in the product, your knowledge of the statistics, and the benefits of your contract to educate people on the real-world benefits. People in the top disability insurance markets are being pushed to buy association coverage, or something other than the top-notch IDI plan you may be selling. Unless you can paint the picture using real-world claims why the association plan does not compete, a 60% lower premium is tough to beat. However, when you can show them some real-world claims situations that would not be paid because of the language in an association (or inferior) IDI policy, you start to look like a credible choice to the consumer. Remember, paint a picture that the client can relate to. Don’t simply tell them they have a 40% chance of getting disabled from something. That doesn’t mean anything.
There are a couple of good resources on the Web today that can help you with your understanding of a policy. For example, Disability Insurance Forums is an online discussion of general DI issues, and About Disability Insurance gets into the specifics of an actual policy talking about some of the more common definitions between different carriers today. Both of these sites are consumer-oriented but the DI Forums has an agent section that gets pretty lively with spirited debate. If you want to learn more about the real-world disability insurance marketplace, both of these sites get into almost every aspect of the business.
